Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[3] in America before the nineteenth century; and they would not deny that, so far as its form, at least, is concerned, most of our later literature confesses an English ancestry.

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Americanism.

But if the spirit of those older writers, the writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was American, what does the form of their writing matter? The answer to this question depends upon what we mean by Americanism. Until the very outbreak of the Revolution there were few persons in the American colonies who were not, in sentiment as well as in mental inheritance, English. England was “home” to them, as it is now to the British Canadian or Australian. Circumstances were of course bringing about a gradual divergence in manners and in special sympathies between the colonist of Massachusetts or Virginia and the Englishman of London. Even the shock of the Revolution could, so far as literature was concerned, only hasten that divergence of type — not transform it into a difference of type. To this day, indeed, the course of that divergence has been so slow that we still find Mr. Howells uttering the opinion, not quite justly, that American literature is merely “a condition of English literature.”

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